In a presentation at the 2008 Exeter IATEFL conference, Catherine Walter and Michael Swan suggested that the use of a number of familiar reading tasks in the L2 classroom may be a waste of time. Similar claims have been made by Scott Thornbury among others. The tasks coming under attack include skimming, scanning and guessing [...]

There was the Lost Generation, The Beat generation and we are now the BBC generation. Let’ prove we can cope with the new challenges. How did my story start? I had been teaching for 3 years and I applied for a Comenius teacher’s methodology course in London. My application was approved by the Human Resource [...]

During my career as an ESL teacher I have come across plenty of teachers who dread teaching children. Because they are naughty. Because they cannot concentrate. Because all they want to do is run around and make a lot of noise. Having taught kids for a couple of years now I wholeheartedly agree with all [...]

Initial Concepts and Assumptions Probably between two and three billion people speak English. These may be defined according to Kachru’s three circles: inner, outer, expanding (Kachru, 1985). But today the majority of English speakers are located in the outer or expanding circles, using English as a lingua franca (ELF). It is used for: academic purposes; [...]

The teacher’s primary responsibility is response-ability Peter Wilberg, 1988 Introduction The lexical approach (LA) was developed some 15 years ago and yet most of its major principles sound pertinent and appropriate for the English language classroom. It is extremely useful while working with students studying English for medical purposes. The target groups of students studying [...]